Bishop is confusing hospital with church

It appears that the local Catholic bishop has confused a hospital with a church.

Again.

On Tuesday, Most Rev. Thomas J. Olmsted, bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix, issued a statement saying that President Barack Obama's concession to Catholic-based health organizations on birth control coverage was not good enough.

The president gave in to the concerns of religious leaders, saying that insurance companies and not religiously affiliated institutions would be mandated to pay for birth control for their workers.

Bishop Olmsted joined others around the country, saying in part, "President Obama's so-called 'accommodation' for religious organizations strongly emphasizes that health-care insurers would be required to subsidize the costs associated with acts that are intrinsically immoral."

Olmsted echoes the sentiments of Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, who heads the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Dolan said of the president's compromise, "Does the federal government have the right to tell a religious individual or a religious entity how to define yourself? This is what gives us greater chill."

Really?

Is it not equally chilling to allow a business with ties to a church to "define" as "immoral" non-Catholic employees who would utilize birth control and deny them the same services as other employees at other hospitals or health-related businesses?

Particularly since they all accept taxpayer dollars.

This is not the first time Bishop Olmsted has wandered out of the chapel and into the operating room.

Two years ago the bishop excommunicated a nun working at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix after doctors there terminated a patient's 11-week pregnancy because she was suffering from a potentially fatal case of pulmonary hypertension.

Doctors concluded that without the intervention both the woman and the fetus would die.

At the time, hospital Vice President Suzanne Pfister said, "We believe that all life is sacred. In this case, we saved the only life we could save, which was the mother's."

The woman had four children. The bishop was not swayed.

He said that Sister Margaret McBride, a Catholic nun and administrator at St. Joe's, had been "automatically excommunicated" when she agreed with the hospital's ethics committee that the fetus had to be aborted in order to save the life of a mother. (The hospital has since severed its official ties with the church, although the bishop still wields what is described as "moral authority" by the new not-for-profit organization.)

In his statement on President Obama's health-care concession Bishop Olmsted says, "These revisions to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services mandate do not respect the religious liberty and moral convictions of all stakeholders in the health coverage transaction. Religious freedom is given to us by God, not conceded to us by the State."

The problem with the bishop's argument is that we're not talking about a church, but about institutions that treat patients of different faiths, employ people of different faiths and accept taxpayer money.

A hospital is a business, not a place of worship, and should follow the same rules as other businesses that accept government funds. (By the church's own estimate, Catholic Charities gets 67 percent of its money from the government.)

I understand the objections that the Catholic officials raised when the issue of contraception first came up. But the administration's accommodation was fair. There is no requirement that a church open a hospital or any other business. If the government tried to tell Catholics how to worship none of us would stand for it. The church may not like this word, but it made a choice. It chose to get into the health-care business.